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TOOLS: Reach Out and Touch

A few years ago, in a much-cited example of how the high-speed Internet might someday be used, a team of far-flung scientists reached out into cyberspace to explore a computer model of a protein together. Now a Web tool for doing just that has been added to the Protein Data Bank, the storehouse of 3D structures for more than 15,000 macromolecules. Called MICE, the tool allows several users to simultaneously view and manipulate the same molecular image from the database in the scientific equivalent of a conference call.